A HARD CASE

The life and death of Primo Levi.

Primo Levi was a man whom people wanted on their side. Not only was he a concentration-camp survivor; with his 1947 book “Survival in Auschwitz,” he was also the camps’ noblest memoirist. No breast-beating for Levi, no look-at-me, no violin song, only a plain, thoughtful record, which by its very modesty stunned the mind. He went on to write two more great books, “The Reawakening” (1963) and “The Periodic Table” (1975), plus a number of excellent ones, and he campaigned for just causes all his life. In the eyes of many, he was a Jewish saint. Peace groups demanded him for their conferences; journalists called to ask him about the future of the Jews. Strangers wrote to him, seeking consolation, prophecy. And often, by virtue of the traits these people admired in his writing—honesty, justice, abstemiousness—he told them things they didn’t want to hear.

Now he has disappointed another person. Carole Angier, in her new book, “The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $40), does not attack Levi. She loves his work. Yet the point of her book, announced in its title and tirelessly argued for seven hundred and thirty-one pages, is that he was a neurotic man, split down the middle. “His gentleness, justice, and detachment were not so much moral or literary choices as his own psychological imperatives,” she writes. He couldn’t help being that way, because “he had never resolved the inner torment of his youth.” That torment was the basis not just of his late-life depressions and his presumed suicide but of all his life and all his work. It is “the key to everything.”

Angier concedes that she may not have the whole truth. Levi’s immediate family—his wife, his sister, his two children—refused to talk to her, and many of his friends would speak only on condition of anonymity. In other words, this is a biography in which the key to the subject’s life is provided by people who refuse to give their names. But Angier says she’ll take responsibility for that. She is a character in this book, she tells us. She gives us extended accounts of her interviews with Levi’s friends. (If I’m not mistaken, she reveals between the lines that she had a sexual adventure with one of them, on a mountain promontory.) She also seems to think she’s psychic. Some of her chapters, she says, will be “rational,” based on evidence. Others will be “irrational,” based on intuition, though she believes that these may be “more true than the rational ones.” If, on the other hand, they’re wrong, that’s O.K., too: “there may be more truth in failure.”

Those words, from her preface, are the last we hear about possible failure. Angier feels that she has solved a mystery. The story of Levi’s terrible end is well known. One morning in 1987, at the age of sixty-seven, he was found dead, his skull crushed, at the base of the stairwell of his building, having fallen—or, as the police and many other people assumed, jumped—from the landing on the third floor, where he lived. Angier begins by asking us to look at the building. Its façade is “blank and stony,” its windows shuttered. Clearly, it is hiding something.

In that building, in Turin, Levi was born to a respectable bourgeois couple in 1919, and, apart from a few brief absences—his year in Auschwitz, for example—he lived there all his life. He was a shy, bookish little boy. According to Angier, his parents were ill-matched. The father, Cesare, an engineer, was a bon vivant. (Walking down the street, Cesare would stop to “caress all the cats, sniff at all the truffles,” Levi later wrote.) The mother, Ester, was a cold, domineering woman. She had a horror of sex, Angier says, so Cesare found it elsewhere. Ester therefore hated Cesare, and she drew her son to her side, forcing him to reject the things his father stood for—above all, sensuality. Levi was attracted to women, but at the same time he was “revolted and terrified” by the thought of sex. This was his “double bond,” or “double bind,” as Angier also calls it (confusingly, because the double bind is an old theory of schizophrenia). Yet in eschewing his father’s traits Primo did not win his mother’s affection. She never loved him. Accordingly, he was left defenseless in the face of all emotion. He lived only in the realm of reason, and shut out everything instinctual. That is the aforementioned “key to everything.”

It is worthwhile here to skip ahead to Levi’s marriage, since in Angier’s view it was merely an extension of the mother-child nexus. Levi married Lucia Morpurgo, a serious-minded young woman, and they moved into Ester’s apartment. (Cesare was dead by then.) Thereafter, whatever Ester did not prevent Primo from doing or feeling, Lucia did—a convenient arrangement, Angier suggests, because it gave Primo something external to blame for what were in fact his own hesitations in life. Lucia was a jealous wife. She resented his work, his fame. She wouldn’t have his friends in the house. The marriage was largely sexless, Angier implies.

Her evidence for these suppositions, both about the parents’ marriage and about Levi’s, is flimsy. Unidentified sources are heavily relied on. So are two novels, one by a cousin of Levi’s and one by his employer’s daughter. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence against Angier’s conclusions. She herself tells us that Lucia was always the first reader of Levi’s writings—a strange circumstance, if she so resented his work. And if Levi was emotionally blocked how do we explain the genius for friendship which, after his solitary childhood, he developed as a young man? Levi’s friends adored him, and he them. This putatively pleasure-fearing man spent night after night at their houses, chatting and telling stories and playing charades.

Life got better for young Primo. He fell in love with his studies, and specialized in chemistry. Angier links this decision to his double bind; he was fleeing the “chaos of human affairs.” Levi gave a different account. Once, charmingly, he said that he was drawn to the chem lab because he liked smells. In “The Periodic Table,” he wrote that the allure of chemistry was that it held out the promise of understanding: “I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ‘I will understand this, too, I will understand everything. . . . I will push open the doors.’ ” In 1941, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Turin. He wanted to go on to graduate study in physics. Mussolini’s race laws (whereby Jews could no longer attend state schools), and then the war, put an end to that plan, though Angier feels that Levi’s double bind is lurking here, too. Supposedly, among the anxieties of this man who wrote more than a dozen books was a morbid fear of failure and a consequent need to limit himself.

Italian Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe. By 1920, the country had had nineteen Jewish senators and two Jewish prime ministers. Levi wrote that when he was young he felt no different from his Christian friends. A Jew, he thought, was just somebody “who should not eat salami but eats it all the same.” With the advent of the race laws, he found out otherwise. In 1943, he joined a partisan band in the Piedmont hills. Within weeks, the group was betrayed and arrested, and Levi, at the age of twenty-four, was sent to Auschwitz.

In his transport, there were six hundred and fifty Jews. Twenty-three survived. That Levi—a timid, scrawny man (five feet five, a hundred and eight pounds)—was one of them seems a miracle. He attributed it to luck. First, he didn’t get to Auschwitz until 1944, so he spent only a year there. Second, he was soon transferred to a block where he found a friend of his, Alberto Dalla Volta. The two men became inseparable, and they made a pact to share everything they had. This agreement, to aid another man—an action rare in the camps, as Levi later pointed out—was probably even more important to his mental health than to his physical well-being. Third, and most crucial, after four months in the camp Levi met a Piedmontese bricklayer named Lorenzo Perone, who was not a prisoner but one of Auschwitz’s many “civilian workers.” Every day, at serious risk to his life, Lorenzo smuggled a mess tin containing two quarts of soup to Levi, which he then shared with Alberto. Without this extra ration, Levi said, he would have died. Fourth, it was eventually discovered that Levi was a chemist, and he was sent to work in one of the camp laboratories, out of reach of the brutal Silesian winter.

Finally, Levi did not become seriously ill until the very end of his year in the camp. In January, 1945, as the Russian Army was crossing Poland and the S.S. was preparing to evacuate Auschwitz, he came down with scarlet fever and was sent to the camp infirmary. He should have died there; the Nazi command gave orders that anyone not strong enough to join the march to Germany should be killed. But the last days of Auschwitz were very chaotic, and in the end the S.S., with some sixty thousand prisoners, abandoned the camp without bothering to shoot the bedridden. On the night before the evacuation, Alberto came and stood under the infirmary window, and he and Levi said goodbye to each other. Both must surely have believed that Alberto would live and Levi would die. Instead, Alberto, together with most of the other Auschwitz evacuees, died on the march, and Levi lived.

It is hard to find the words to praise “Survival in Auschwitz,” and this is not because of the enormity that it records but because of its internal qualities: the intelligence, the fine-mindedness, the sheer narrative skill with which Levi addresses that enormity. He later said that he modelled the book on the “weekly report” issued in chemical factories. Accordingly, he sticks to the facts, and they are fascinating. He tells us, for example, about the toilet problems in Auschwitz. At night, in the block, you had to learn to time your trip to the bucket so that you would not be the one to fill it to the rim. If you did, you had to carry it, spilling on your feet, through the snow, and empty it in the camp latrine. Many prisoners became expert in judging, during their half sleep, the sound their fellows’ urine made as it hit the bucket. Half full, near-full: each made a different splash.

Levi writes with pity, and with outrage, too, but those emotions almost never come unmixed with the memory of other, less respectable feelings: the fear of smelling bad in front of women, the pain of seeing old men naked, the overriding wish to live, though others might die. Levi records how, one day, the camp was swept with excitement at the news that there was to be a distribution of new shirts, because “a convoy of Hungarians . . . had arrived three days ago.” (In other words, the shirts would be from gassed Hungarians.) He tells how, after one of the infamous “selections”—where the prisoners were forced to run naked in front of an S.S. officer, who then sorted their name cards to the right or to the left (that is, to be exterminated immediately or not)—the men couldn’t figure out which was the death sentence, the right pile or the left. So they crowded around the oldest, weakest man in the block, asking him which side his card went to. This is not the only dark comedy. There is a whole chapter on the camp’s black market, where starving men stood around, just as at the bourse, comparing barter rates for various negotiable items and scurrying to cash in their supplies of stolen nails or shoe grease when the price went up from one portion of bread to two.

The title of the Italian edition of “Survival in Auschwitz” is “Se Questo È un Uomo” (“If This Is a Man”), and the book’s purpose is to ask that question: whether people reduced to such circumstances were still men. It’s a close call. The last chapter describes the week and a half that Levi and ten other men spent, near death, in the infectious ward of the camp infirmary between the time their German captors left and their Russian liberators arrived. They had no heat, no food. Then came the Allied bombings, setting fires in the camp. Patients driven out of their quarters hammered on the door of Levi’s ward, pleading to be let in. Levi and the others knew that they could not support a single additional person: “We had to barricade the door. They dragged themselves elsewhere, lit up by the flames, barefoot in the melting snow. Many trailed behind them streaming bandages. There seemed no danger to our hut, so long as the wind did not change.” It must have taken guts to write that last sentence, but the problem it poses—survival versus fellow feeling—is the story of the book.

The story has a happy ending, and that is one of the reasons people love “Survival in Auschwitz.” It votes for humankind; it says that these desperate creatures were still men, or that they returned to that condition as soon as they could. One day, Levi and two young Frenchmen, Charles and Arthur, went out into the camp to scavenge. They found some potatoes; they also found a stove, and set it up in the ward, and cooked the potatoes on it, and passed them around. From then on, as Philip Roth pointed out in a 1986 interview with Levi, the book becomes like “Robinson Crusoe,” a tale of inspired scrounging, of a treasure hunt, almost. (On a later foray, into the S.S. barracks, Levi found “four first-rate eiderdowns, one of which is today in my house in Turin.”) It is also the story of a contest: how many of the men in the ward can Levi and Charles and Arthur save from death before the Russians get there? Levi does not present this as a matter of altruism. He treats it as a test of enterprise, and thus he keeps sentimentality and self-congratulation at bay. But enterprise is enough.

On the night Levi and his French friends brought back the stove and the potatoes, one of their ward-mates—Towarowski, a typhus patient—proposed that each man give a portion of his food to those who had gone on this mission. “Only a day before, a similar event would have been inconceivable,” Levi writes. “The law of the Lager [camp] said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.’ ” Towarowski’s proposal, and the ward’s agreement, “meant that the Lager was dead.” That night:

Arthur and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs found in the kitchen, and spoke of many things, both past and future. In the middle of this endless plain, frozen and full of war, in the small dark room swarming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and with the world. We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something useful—perhaps like God after the first day of creation.

Eight days later comes the liberation. A man in the ward has died (they lost only one), and Levi and Charles have gone out into the snow to deposit his body in the common grave. But the grave is full, “overflowing with discolored limbs.” As they are standing there, wondering what to do, they look up and see four Russian soldiers, “with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats,” coming down the road on horseback. “When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words. . . . They did not greet us, nor did they smile.” To Levi and Charles, the sight of men in a state of advanced starvation—not to speak of a ditch full of skeletal corpses—was common, but to these young Russians it was not. On their faces, Levi writes, he saw shame, the shame “that the just man experiences at another man’s crime.” Horribly, Levi and Charles were also ashamed, filled “with a painful sense of pudency . . . and also with anguish, because we felt . . . that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past.”

When Levi got back to Turin, he fell in love, married, and went to work as an industrial chemist, a profession that he pursued full time for almost thirty years. (His first six books were written at night and on weekends.) He had already decided in the camp that if he lived he would write a book about the experience. Within a month of his return, he began “Survival in Auschwitz,” and he finished it in just over a year. When it was first published, in 1947, it sold only about fifteen hundred copies. At that time, no one wanted to hear about the camps. But when the book was revised and reissued, in 1958, it was a runaway success.

Heartened, Levi embarked on a sequel, “The Reawakening,” which describes his journey home from the camp. Like “Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening” is not just a memoir—it is a moral tale, in this case the story of Levi’s remarriage to life—and, in contrast to the tight-lipped “Survival in Auschwitz,” it is loose and gay. Levi later said that by the time he wrote down these stories, more than a decade after the events, he had told them many times. Hence the book’s picaresque quality—it is a string of anecdotes—and also, at times, a certain patness in the comedy. This is shtick, well polished. (And that’s just fine. We want him to have this pleasure, of telling his favorite joke.) The guiding spirits of the book are the Russians, his liberators, a people, in Levi’s view, as decent and disorganized as the Germans were criminal and efficient. Between their endemic chaos and the fact that, for much of this time, there was still a war on, it took the Russians seven months to get Levi pointed southwest rather than northeast of Auschwitz—he had a leisurely stroll through Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, and Hungary—but they fed the ex-prisoners well when they could, and gave everyone (babies included) ten ounces of tobacco a month, and put on variety shows, with singing and dancing, in the holding camps.

”Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Reawakening” established Levi as a writer, but a certain kind of writer: a survivor, a witness. He wanted to serve as a witness, and desired it all the more urgently as, in the seventies, neo-Fascism and Holocaust denial reared their heads. He spoke to endless numbers of school groups. He received scores of interviewers, and when, long after he had begun writing about subjects other than the Holocaust, they asked him only about the Holocaust he patiently replied. Indeed, he wrote three more books about the Holocaust. One, the novel “If Not Now, When?” (1982), was the story of a group of Jewish partisans sabotaging Nazi operations in the last years of the war. This was his answer to the widespread claim that the Jews went like lambs to the slaughter.

But the more Levi shouldered his responsibilities as a Jew the more he got caught in the toils of the Holocaust culture. Like most Italian Jews, he believed in assimilation. And he did not consider the Jews to be heroes because Hitler had tried to exterminate them. As he saw it, they were merely human—Fascism’s crime was to have deprived them of that status—and humanity was what we had to understand if we harbored any hope of a just world. Accordingly, he gave Israel no breaks. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew,” he told an Italian newspaper in 1982, “and today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”* After the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, he said that Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon were bringing down shame on the name of the Jews, and he called for their resignation. This brought a flood of letters accusing him of giving comfort to the enemy. In sum, Levi, the greatest soul, the greatest artist, of the “witness” writers, was not usable the way the others were. It was not Levi but his friend Elie Wiesel who got a Nobel Prize.

In 1985, two years before Levi’s death, Commentary published an article by Fernanda Eberstadt, claiming that the true, Jewish meaning of the Holocaust was beyond “so fastidious and uncertain an imagination” as his. He was a literary master, but in a “minor key.” He was an aesthete, a decadent, like the Latin poet Ausonius, who, while the barbarians were threatening Rome, retired to his estate in Bordeaux to grow roses and “compose poetry dallying in ‘anagram and compliment, enamelled fragments of philosophy, the fading of roses, the flavor of oysters.’ ”

All this was torture to Levi, but nothing was worse than the implied message that, given his history, he was barred from writing about anything other than the Holocaust. For him to produce “just” stories, “just” essays—not about Jews—would be viewed as an abdication, a rose-smelling. By him, too. Because of this scruple, he published his first non-Holocaust book, a 1966 collection of stories, under a pseudonym—an action that greatly annoyed his reviewers. (They thought it was coy.) But everyone got over that in 1975, with the publication of “The Periodic Table.” This book once again had credentials as testimony. It was signed by Primo Levi, and it included some war stories. At the same time, much of it was not about the war, and all of it was art of the highest order, as was widely recognized. He had finally crossed over.

Like Kafka before him and Sebald after, Levi invented a new genre—in his case, the “science fable,” a cross between his two professions, chemistry and literature. True to the book’s title, the contents page of “The Periodic Table” reads “Argon,” “Hydrogen,” “Zinc,” and so on. In each chapter, Levi uses one element as an anchor for autobiography or fiction or essay. Some chapters are very funny. In “Tin,” for example, he tells of the small, independent chemistry lab that he and his friend Emilio set up, at the beginning of their careers, in the bedroom of Emilio’s obliging parents. The lab’s misfortunes were frequent:

It is not that hydrochloric acid is actually toxic: it is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance. . . . You cannot mistake it for anything else, because after having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein’s movies. . . . Acid fumes invaded all the rooms: the wallpaper changed color . . . and every so often a sinister thump made us jump: a nail had been corroded through and a picture, in some corner of the apartment, had crashed to the floor. Emilio hammered a new nail and hung the picture back in its place.

There are other stories like that, and stories utterly unlike that—lyrical, grieving stories, and spooky stories, too. Each tale is wholly specific and individual, the way chemicals are—the way mercury dances, and lead sinks, and bromine smells. Together, the twenty-one chapters describe a huge psychological arc, parallel to the arc described on the material plane by the periodic table. The book was a best-seller in Italy, and when it was published in the United States, nine years later, in a beautiful translation by Raymond Rosenthal, Levi became an international hero. People stopped him on the street to get his autograph. “If this goes on,” he said, “I’ll have to shave my beard.”

It didn’t go on long. Levi had produced one more splendid book, a 1978 novel called “The Monkey’s Wrench.” But his flame began to gutter, and his life became more difficult.

The source of the problem, in Angier’s view, was Levi’s double bind. She trawls his novels, his memoirs, his stories for what they can reveal about his psychic conflicts. When he invents the “science fable,” often having to do with curiosities, oddities, that’s because he was frightened at how odd his psyche was. When, in “The Periodic Table,” he tells a nice story about a mine where he worked as a young man, that, too, gets a raising of the eyebrows. The mine, Levi writes, was reputed, in former days, to have been a hotbed of sexual misbehavior:

Every evening, when the five-thirty siren sounded, none of the clerks went home. At that signal, liquor and mattresses suddenly popped up from among the desks, and an orgy erupted that embraced everything and everyone, young pubescent stenographers and balding accountants, starting with the then director all the way down to the disabled doormen: the sad round of mining paperwork gave way suddenly, every evening, to a boundless interclass fornication, public and variously entwined.

What is it about me that I find this funny? To Angier, it demonstrates Levi’s internalization of his mother’s horror of sex.

That’s her angle on his work. As for his life, the position she takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She’s O.K. We’re O.K. Why wasn’t he O.K.? Why did he have to work all the time? Why didn’t he take more vacations? And how about getting laid once in a while? She records that as a teen-ager he mooned over various girls, but whenever he got near one he blushed and fell silent. “What was this?” Angier asks. “Can anyone ever say?” I can say. Has Angier never heard of geeks? They are born every day, and they grow up to do much of the world’s intellectual and artistic work. One wonders, at times, why Angier chose Levi as a subject—she seems to find him so peculiar. And does she imagine that if he had been more “normal”—less reserved, less scrupulous—he would have written those books she so admires?

Levi did suffer serious depressions in his later life. This is not speculation on Angier’s part. He went to psychiatrists; he took antidepressants. Nevertheless, the account Angier gives us is tailored to her prior interpretations. She never tells us when he suffered his first depression, presumably because that would limit the problem, and she never seriously considers the possibility that his disorder may have been endogenous (caused by biochemical abnormalities) rather than exogenous (a response to events in his life). Endogenous depressions are more likely to cycle regularly, as Levi’s did. But, if his depressions were biochemically based, what would that do to Angier’s double-bind theory?

Nor does she make much allowance for the evidence against depression, or for frequent relief from depression. It was during the early nineteen-seventies, when, according to Angier, Levi’s mental state was “so terrifying that it is hard to imagine anything worse,” that he wrote the superb and funny “Periodic Table.” Likewise, in the late nineteen-seventies, when he is again supposed to have been despondent, he produced—with great ease—”The Monkey’s Wrench,” which Angier herself calls “his most optimistic, most entertaining book.” This is not to say that depressed artists can’t produce happy work. But the record of cheerful activity in Levi’s last decade—during which time he not only wrote seven books and translated four others (including Kafka’s “The Trial”) but sometimes published more than twenty newspaper articles a year, meanwhile taking hikes, spending evenings at his friends’ houses, and fashioning little animal sculptures out of the insulated wire produced by his old company—seems to call for some qualification of Angier’s view that his last ten years were a dark, dark time. It doesn’t make a dent. To her credit, she records the opposing evidence. But then, in most cases, she simply moves on, unfazed, with the pathological sequence she has set up: disturbed mother-child relationship, double bind, repression, return of the repressed, depression, suicide. The book is relentlessly teleological. It shoots like an arrow to Levi’s suicide.

A problem here is that we don’t know if Levi committed suicide. As the Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta pointed out in a measured essay in the Boston Review in 1999, there is good evidence that he did and good evidence that he didn’t. In the months and weeks before his death, Levi said that he was depressed, and tortured by living with his now senile mother. Nevertheless, he was full of bustle and plans. He wrote new stories, witty stories. The day before he died, he spoke with a journalist who was writing a biography of him, and suggested that they get back to work. The morning of his death, he seemed fine to those who saw him. Shortly after ten, he told his mother’s nurse that he was going down to the concierge’s lodge, and asked her to take any calls. (As Angier acknowledges, a man going out to kill himself is unlikely to worry about his phone messages.) Then he walked onto the landing and somehow went over the bannister. Could this have been an accident? Easily, Gambetta says. The top of the railing was no higher than Levi’s waist, and the medication he was taking can cause dizziness. He could have leaned over, to look for someone on the stairs—perhaps his wife, who had gone shopping—and lost his balance. Such a scenario would solve a big problem with the suicide hypothesis: the gruesome and theatrical manner of his death. It is hard to believe that the modest Levi—who, furthermore, as a chemist, knew how to kill himself discreetly—would have chosen such a means.

These facts have been debated for years, in an atmosphere clouded by emotion and politics. “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later,” Elie Wiesel declared. Others, also assuming suicide, grieved that this wiped out the idealism that had seemed to inform his books. Still others clung to that idealism and said that it ruled out suicide: Levi would never have succumbed, never have given the Nazis that victory.

Angier believes that he committed suicide but that this had nothing to do with the camps: “For him Auschwitz was an essentially positive experience. It gave him a reason to live, to communicate, to write. . . . It was, as he always said, his adventure, his time in Technicolor, his university. . . . The central, painful and paradoxical truth is that Primo Levi was depressed before and after Auschwitz, but not in it. He thought of suicide before and after Auschwitz, but not in it. Depression and suicide were in him from the start.” This is a bold theory, and highly questionable. (As noted, Angier regards shyness and scrupulousness as depressive symptoms.) In her view, he did not plan to commit suicide; he did it on an impulse. The “void” drew him, the same void that “draws all deep depressives, like a call.” He went to the landing, perhaps, on his way outdoors, and he gazed into the void, in the form of the stairwell. “He leaned and looked . . . and he let go.” Those are the last words of the book.

Readers can decide for themselves. (Or not decide. Gambetta says we will never know.) But, even if Levi did commit suicide, it is a species of sentimentality to think that the end of something tells the truth about it. That’s the case with mystery novels, but not with lives. Nor do we have any reason to believe that life should not be sad. Many lives are sad, and fraught with double binds, which just means conflicts. We make of them what we can, and then we throw up our hands and die. The things that Levi made of his life—”Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening,” “The Periodic Table”—are in no way diminished by the possibility that he killed himself. They may even seem more remarkable and moving: the darker the night, the brighter the stars. ♦

*The second part of this quote was erroneously attributed to Primo Levi in the book by Carole Angier.

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